Thoughts On Wright

March 24, 2008

I've just read Dayo Olopade's fascinating piece,
"Far Wright," on Barack Obama's far-left preacher, Jeremiah Wright.
It's an insightful piece, and it evoked memories of the two black
churches I sometimes attended when I lived in Georgetown. But I'm no
expert and Dayo is.

A good friend of mine,
Morton Klein, who is president of the Zionist Organization of America,
a post once held by none other than Louis Dembitz Brandeis, sent me his
own impressions of Jeremiah Wright, impressions that contrast with what
one might think after having heard Obama characterize his pastor. Now,
Klein is not for Obama; and I am. But what Klein remembers about the
Philadelphia in which he and Wright grew up is a contribution towards
understanding this strange but apparently common type of preacher.

OBAMA'S PASTOR RAISED IN PRIVILEGE, NOT POVERTY

How do I know?

It
happens that, as a Philadelphian, I attended Central High School – the
same public school Jeremiah Wright attended from 1955 to 1959. He could
have gone to an integrated neighborhood school, but he chose to go to
Central, a virtually all-white school. Central is the second oldest
public high school in the country, which attracts the most serious
academic students in the city. The school then was about 80% Jewish and
95% white. The African-American students, like all the others, were
there on merit. Generally speaking, we came from lower/middle class
backgrounds. Many of our parents had not received a formal education
and we tended to live in row houses. In short, economically, we were
roughly on par.

I attended Central a few years
after Rev. Wright, so I did not know him personally. But I knew of him
and I know where he used to live – in a tree-lined neighborhood of
large stone houses in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. This is a
lovely neighborhood to this day. Moreover, Rev. Wright's father was a
prominent pastor and his mother was a teacher and later vice-principal
and disciplinarian of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, also a
distinguished academic high school. Two of my acquaintances remember
her as an intimidating and strict disciplinarian and excellent math
teacher. In short, Rev. Wright had a comfortable upper-middle class
upbringing. It was hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested
by Senator Obama to explain what he calls Wright's anger and what I
describe as his hatred.

In recent days, we
have seen clips of several of Rev. Wright's sermons, showing him
declaring "G-d Damn America," blaming America for intentionally
creating the drug problem, for creating the AIDS virus, for supporting
Israeli "state terrorism against Palestinians," for being responsible
for causing 9-11, for being white supremacist and racist and for
intentionally keeping people in poverty.

We
have also learned that, last year, Rev. Wright's Church honored with a
lifetime achievement award Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, who
has said that "Judaism is a gutter religion," that "Hitler was a very
great man" and that "white people are potential humans, they haven't
evolved yet." In fact, Rev. Wright accompanied Farrakhan in the 1980s
on a visit to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, which was then illegal under
U.S. law. Nevertheless, the Church and Wright's successor as pastor,
Rev. Otis Moss III, have issued a statement defending and praising Wright, while completely ignoring Wright's horrific statements.

Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America.